Traditionally, fresh dairy products like cheese, Ice-cream, yoghurt, salads in particular tuna salad, vegetable mayonnaise, fish salads or the like, are prepared and filled into suitable containers, which are afterwards provided with a closure or lid, all performed more or less manually. Demands for better food safety and hygiene standards have more recently led food suppliers to move away form this traditional way toward a more automated system.
One known dairy product machine automatically fills the fresh dairy product into suitable containers, which are subsequently fitted with individual, pre-shaped closures fed from a stack of loose closure blanks. Other known diary product machines close the containers by interconnected closures that may be separated after the closures have been applied. To reduce the risk of contamination of the fresh dairy product during packaging, the whole dairy product machine may be encapsulated in a housing having a controlled atmosphere.